Tech

The new emoji coming this year include broccoli, a T. rex and this oddly sexy insect

Good news, mermaids and mermen: Your emoji are officially coming this year.

Unicode, the organization that standardizes characters across devices, released its final list of 2017 emoji on Monday. There are 56 new emoji—69 if you count gender variations—and they're really all over the place. You'll be able to use new gender-neutral people, broccoli, mermaids, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a cricket with incredibly strong, beautiful legs:

Broccoli!

Image: Emojipedia

A cricket!

Image: Emojipedia

"Today is the first time we know that these are confirmed as the emojis for 2017," Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee, said via direct message on Twitter. "No more🤞🤞🤞 that an emoji makes the cut. If it's in this list, it's final."

"I do not think the cricket's legs are sexy, for what it's worth," he added.

Emojipedia creates its own mock-ups of the approved emoji list based on how they're likely to appear on iOS. These aren't final designs, in other words, but they do represent emoji that are absolutely coming later this year. (It's likely that the cricket will be less ripped.)

Those sauna emoji were actually proposed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland ("Sauna is practically a holy place in Finland where there exists around 3.2 million saunas for 5.4 million people," it wrote), and they were much more suggestive in their original iteration:

Image: Unicode

Just because Unicode approves an emoji doesn't mean that a company like Apple will enable it on a device like the iPhone, but Burge said Apple and Google have both adopted 100 percent of new emoji releases so far.

Some of the new emoji are sort of curious—there's a whole suite of fantasy-themed characters, for instance:

Image: Emojipedia

And there are new smileys that seem a bit redundant—a barfing face right after we got a "sick" face last year, for example:

Image: Emojipedia

Burge said some of the decisions were made to standardize emoji that exist in some form already. For example, Facebook has long offered that starry-eyed smiley in its News Feed as part of the "Feeling/Activity" feature:

Image: Facebook

The full list is published on Emojipedia's website, though the group also made a video showing off all the new emoji. It's embedded above, if you're curious.

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